Sachsenhausen, 2016. Tourists filter off buses, walk through the parking lot and between the gates of a former Nazi death camp. They observe what remains of the architecture. They pose for photographs— some smiling, some somber. They take selfies. In crisp black and white, the camera observes the behavior of a few among thousands of tourists who visit sites increasingly relinquished to the annals of history.

A bold, inquisitive but at times darkly humorous film, Austerlitz holds a mirror between the past and the present, memory and forgetting. Prolific Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa's eighth documentary premiered at Venice, Cartagena and Traverse City Film Festival, where it won Best Avant-Garde Film. Nominated for Indiewire Critics' Poll for Best Undistributed Film; it won 8th place.

"The title of Sergei Loznitsa's mysterious, challenging, disturbing film is said by the director to be inspired by the 2001 novel by WG Sebald, in which a character called Austerlitz, after an upbringing in Britain as a Kindertransport refugee, sees a Nazi propaganda film about the Theresienstadt camp and thinks that he recognizes his mother. It is a book partly about the petrification and nullification of history created by official memorials. Of course, it has another meaning: the title looks in the first fraction of a second like 'Auschwitz.' It is a linguistic trompe l'oeil. The horrors of the 20th century are receding into the dusty tomb of history, joining the battles of the 19th century: Auschwitz is a word that may one day have as little electrical charge as Austerlitz... Above all, Loznitsa shows you the central activity: looking. Everyone is looking, looking, looking. Looking at what? Buildings, walls, yards, enclosures. The victims are not there. The war criminals are not there. The past is not there. Perhaps each new tourist erodes the site further until all that is left is dust. But visiting these sites is not meaningless and not wrong. It is part of human curiosity, which is better than indifference or forgetting"

"Austerlitz the film is perhaps above all a haunting meditation, in which the physical history of the camps battles with oblivion"

"If poetry after Auschwitz constituted an act of barbarism, then what can be made of curious tourists eating sandwiches, or snapping self-portraits, on the lawns of former concentration camps now repurposed as museums? The question isn't so much posed as interrogatively embedded in Austerlitz's conceptual framework, in which 'dark tourism' is subjected to a formally distanced yet skeptical gaze of its own, by way of a camera that is, to all appearances, indistinguishable from— and yet purely oppositional to— the ubiquitous memory tool of choice brandished by the idling hordes. Premised on the paradox of fleeting vigilance and historical sampling, Austerlitz extends from Sergei Loznitsa's own visit to Buchenwald, where a source of unease arose from proximity to the living rather than the dead. If memorializing the Holocaust feels born of an ethical imperative to remember, such memorial tourism does not necessarily entail an act of conscience. It is from this doubly frightful position that Loznitsa, and by extension Austerlitz, at once recoils and embeds itself"

"Human tones, bird cries, church bells, the rising and falling wind, insectoid whirrings, unidentifiable creakings and crashings... all combine into an immersive, often chilling and always compelling world of sound, which manages to subtly convey the lurking horrors beneath Sachsenhausen's mute, neutral surfaces. We are, to use a phrase from the Sebald novel, 'like a deaf man whose hearing has been miraculously restored'"

"Surely anyone can agree that posing for a picture with arms behind your back in front of a torture pole is just wrong, and the same goes for that happy family at the end, snapping three different pictures with their selfie stick under the infamous sign 'Arbeit Macht Frei.' Nonetheless, if you keep watching long enough, the very act of showing up becomes problematic. There is a fundamental incompatibility between the notion of a death camp and the innately human shortcomings of our attempts to witness it. In a nutshell, the uneasiness of this realization is the film itself"